A Little Stool in Red Oak

Dave R

Thanks Marcus. Actually there are three lights. One above the stools, one to the left of the camera and fairly low in this last render and the third is behind and to the right of the camera.

Maybe if I really float the stools, say 1/32 of an inch above the floor, I'll get enough of a shadow under them to give the effect. In reality, though the carpet texture should deform a little.

d12dozr

Oh yeah, I can see multiple shadows now.

notareal

@dave r said:

Any suggestions from the rendering gurus on how to give the stools the appearance of weight. It looks like they are floating on the carpet when they should be sunken in. Maybe I could make a mesh and depressions under the feet with sandbox tools? Any other suggestions?

Not sure what renderer you used, but if you don't want to go and remodel the carper, you could try to add some AO effect. Also like said, you could try to float chairs a bit...

Dave R

thanks for the suggestion. I'll see if I can sort that out. I used KT for these.

olishea

Yeah they do look a bit floaty. I wouldn't go as far as deforming the floor though. Lifting objects away from the surface can add some shadow underneath but since you have used roundcorner (quite rightly) I don't think the shadow will become obvious. Best off exploring the AO route as notareal suggests. If you want any more critique I have to say the skirting texture looks too low res.

Instead of re-rendering the whole scene, can you export an AO pass and then overlay it in photoshop using the multiply blending mode? I think you can in KT.

Dave R

Thanks Oli. I didn't round over the corners on the bottom of the feet. I only rounded the edges up the outside and in the recess underneath.

I didn't really want that texture on the skirting board to be high res. I didn't really expect it to be the focus of attention. I added a little bump to it, too, to keep it from being so shiny.

olishea

I understand, it's just when there are so few objects in the scene everything stands out. It's easier to notice these things that's all. I was just being a picky bugger.

Dave R

That's alright. Maybe I should reduce the DOF a bit.

notareal

@dave r said:

thanks for the suggestion. I'll see if I can sort that out. I used KT for these.

There is no proper AO in KT, so float or modify mesh to get some recess around the feet. If you used KT biased engine, missing contact shadows is just a feature... for example Thea has different approach in it's biased engine (Field Mapping instead of Photon Mapping) and it can produce good contact shadows ( +there is AO feature if needed). With KT, unbiased engines should produce better contact shadows, but still... floating models a bit will help.

nickchun

I think the floating effect is because the carpet is a flat surface with false 3d relief, your brain wants to tell you it isn't flat but the feet are siting on a flat surface

Dave R

Yeah, I can see that. I guess the trick is to change what the brain thinks it sees. I could take the easy way out and change the flooring to something hard like tile of wood.

Box

It is that damn carpet, I tried everything, bumps, lighting, holding my mouth right, a rabbit, nothing I could do made the carpet work. It's always the way, nobody sees the good stuff just the problems.

Dave's.JPG

Dave R

A whole rabbit? That's really trying!

Hmmm.... I guess I'll tear out the carpet and put down something else.

Nice stool, though.

nickchun

Yes and the original wood textures are great. How do you go about getting even lighting when you take the photos?

Dave R

Nick, I think it's pure luck. It doesn't always work out that way.

Actually it probably isn't very even end to end. It matters most that it's even across the width of the board. My texture images cover 6 to 14 feet of a board so I don't need the material to repeat along the length like the typical square texture images must. Because of the size of the texture and because it is supposed to represent real wood, I have no use for seamless textures. Usually I'll have two or more boards from the same tree and I try to make them as similar in exposure as I can get.